Transistor count

The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device (typically on a single substrate or "chip"). It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity (although the majority of transistors in modern microprocessors are contained in cache memories, which consist mostly of the same memory cell circuits replicated many times). The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a chip, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is: a better indication of this is transistor density (the ratio of a chip's transistor count to its area).

As of 2023, the highest transistor count in flash memory is Micron's 2 terabyte (3D-stacked) 16-die, 232-layer V-NAND flash memory chip, with 5.3 trillion floating-gate MOSFETs (3 bits per transistor).

The highest transistor count in a single chip processor as of 2020 is that of the deep learning processor Wafer Scale Engine 2 by Cerebras. It has 2.6 trillion MOSFETs in 84 exposed fields (dies) on a wafer, manufactured using TSMC's 7 nm FinFET process.

As of 2023, the GPU with the highest transistor count is AMD's MI300X, built on TSMC's N5 process and totalling 153 billion MOSFETs.

The highest transistor count in a consumer microprocessor as of June 2023 is 134 billion transistors, in Apple's ARM-based dual-die M2 Ultra system on a chip, which is fabricated using TSMC's 5 nm semiconductor manufacturing process.

Year	Component	Name	Number of MOSFETs (in trillions)	Remarks
2022	Flash memory	Micron's V-NAND chip	5.3	stacked package of sixteen 232-layer 3D NAND dies
2020	any processor	Wafer Scale Engine 2	2.6	wafer-scale design of 84 exposed fields (dies)
2023	GPU	MI300X	0.153
2023	microprocessor (commercial)	M2 Ultra	0.134	dual-die SoC; entire M2 Ultra is a multi-chip module
2020	DLP	Colossus Mk2 GC200	0.059	An IPU in contrast to CPU and GPU

In terms of computer systems that consist of numerous integrated circuits, the supercomputer with the highest transistor count as of 2016 was the Chinese-designed Sunway TaihuLight, which has for all CPUs/nodes combined "about 400 trillion transistors in the processing part of the hardware" and "the DRAM includes about 12 quadrillion transistors, and that's about 97 percent of all the transistors." To compare, the smallest computer, as of 2018 dwarfed by a grain of rice, had on the order of 100,000 transistors. Early experimental solid-state computers had as few as 130 transistors but used large amounts of diode logic. The first carbon nanotube computer had 178 transistors and was a 1-bit one-instruction set computer, while a later one is 16-bit (its instruction set is 32-bit RISC-V though).

Ionic transistor chips ("water-based" analog limited processor), have up to hundreds of such transistors.

Estimates of the total numbers of transistors manufactured:

Up to 2014: 2.9×10²¹
Up to 2018: 1.3×10²²

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Semiconductor device fabrication

MOSFET scaling (process nodes)
020 µm – 1968 010 µm – 1971 006 µm – 1974 003 µm – 1977 1.5 µm – 1981 001 µm – 1984 800 nm – 1987 600 nm – 1990 350 nm – 1993 250 nm – 1996 180 nm – 1999 130 nm – 2001 090 nm – 2003 065 nm – 2005 045 nm – 2007 032 nm – 2009 022 nm – 2012 014 nm – 2014 010 nm – 2016 007 nm – 2018 005 nm – 2020 003 nm – 2022
Future 002 nm ~ 2024
Half-nodes Density CMOS Device (multi-gate) Moore's law Transistor count Semiconductor Industry Nanoelectronics